A new paradigm for being a conscious being here and now on beautiful Planet Earth. A cross between "synthesis", "renaissance", "cryogenics" and "benthic"..."a flowering of creativity that's extremely cool and very deep." And the name of a yahoo e-group I started in 2002, now with around 1800 members, mostly friends of mine. Cheers Jeff

About three weeks ago I flew out of Hobart to Melbourne en route to Christchurch New Zealand. The summer afternoon was quite warm and dry, indeed, this summer has been extremely hot and dry all over southern Australia as well as both islands of New Zealand. But it's not 'global warming'...the Arctic has had a thicker ice cover this past winter than in many years!

As we got close to Melbourne I noticed that we were circling around and around and finally the captain announced that we were in an indefinite holding pattern due to a massive thunderstorm passing over Melbourne. Luckily I had a good window seat and was able to get what I consider to be breath-takingly beautiful photos of a massive storm-system from within the storm system itself...something I've never experienced before and was quite awe-struck by what I was able to see.

I even saw a rainbow at one point, just as Liesbet and I saw a rainbow out of our plane window flying from Auckland to Sydney last June, and we were escorted by a succession of rainbows all the way from when we left Great Barrier Island!('Aniwaniwa' is the ancient Maori/Waitaha name for 'rainbow') We loves her :)

I have had a very deep connection with storms and thunder-beings for decades, going way back to my early years of hitch-hiking all over North America. The only recurring theme in dreams in my life is tornados, and I've had many dozens of them; I've never got sucked up in a dream but have felt allied with them as powerful entities. And I somehow developed a connection with rain-beings around the same time, such that it seemed like every time I got ready to hitch-hike somewhere, rain would appear out of nowhere. It happened so much that my friends started commenting on it!

During our visits to Flinders Island, Tasmania, Liesbet and I had remarkable encounters with vast storm fronts consisting of freaky-looking clouds that looked like heads and dogs, for example, first on the very first day we arrived at Arne's place in 2009, and again on the very day we were leaving. Then in 2011 we had another astounding encounter with a storm-entity that came up over the sand dunes as we walked along the beach...it was literally like a huge mother-ship made of luminous clouds...breathtaking. And on Mt. Titiroa in Fiordland last year we were up there with another amazing storm-being that looked like the start of a tornado vortex, and were then treated to a magnificent display of rainbow-coloured clouds as the sun went down.

This storm over Melbourne kept us circling for over an hour, and I loved every minute of it...even speculating that someone could operate 'storm-watching' tours where they would take people up inside storm clouds...but then I realized that there could be an element of danger from lightning strikes or wind turbulence...and I then wondered how much fuel we were carrying?

Finally we landed, and as we waited for our connecting flight to Christchurch, we could hear massive booms from thunder outside the terminal and occasionally see brilliant flashes of lightning. But time went by and when I went to the appointed gate for departure, no one was there. See, the entire airport had been shut down because of the storm.

This went on for several hours. Finally, we realized that our connecting flight had been unable to land and had diverted to Sydney to refuel and would then return to get us. Just as the Virgin people were telling us that if the flight was cancelled, they would give us all our luggage back and put us up in a hotel until we could get another flight, which might be one to three days. I was feeling extremely claustrophobic after being in a plane and then the anaerobic environment of an airport for almost 10 hours, and I REALLY did not want to stay in a hotel for one to three days waiting for a flight.

Luckily, as we were within 20 minutes of our flight being cancelled, the pilot radioed in that he was finally able to land after being in a queue for quite a while. WHEW.

I would like to thank the Rainbow Serpent herself and the spirit of Australia, the indigenous people and the dream-time ancestors for taking such wonderful care of me for the past few months there, and for sending me off in such a brilliant way. During this past few month visit there I've never felt so enwombed in the dream-time consciousness field and never been so marvelously looked-after for such a continuous period, except for when they brought Liesbet and me together in Darwin in 2007. I trust and pray that the same dream-time ancestors who brought Liesbet and I together are looking after her now as she does her own thing for a while in Tasmania, uplifting and inspiring her to further heights of awesome creativity, and helping her spreading schmetterling wings to grow and dry for flight to new levels of beauty, and that the miraculous possibility may exist that we can be together again someday to continue the astronomically amazing journey that we shared for five years in honour of life and Mother Earth, and that we may once again be the 'ultimate creative partnership.'

I know anything is possible with the guiding and protective intelligence and love of beings or consciousnesses who can control thunder-storms and communicate with us in this kind of way. After consciously tuning into the dream-time energies for many months, and completing my 'Cetacean Rainbow Dreaming' paintings in honour of the Rainbow Serpent and the whales and dolphins, I feel as if I were carrying a 'charge' of some kind of transformative energy that built up in me, that I was held inside that storm-being for many hours to accumulate a charge then transported over to New Zealand to bring a wave of transformative and healing energies to Mother Earth and the whales and dolphins under attack so heavily in Christchurch(photo by Liesbet Verstraeten) and New Zealand in general. Almost like I was the charge in a vast bio-capacitor sent to discharge and make the connection between Australia and New Zealand. My first real connection with the Earth once back in New Zealand was inside the Akaroa volcanic crater when I communed with a stream there, so maybe the connection, the bridge has been completed, and now the energies are flowing.